Small micro-batteries, such as commonly used in, for example, miniature and portable electronic devices such as cardiac pacemakers, hearing aids, smart cards, remote sensors and personal communications devices such as cell phones and hand held/personal computer devices, commonly do not provide desired power and energy densities because the packaging, internal hardware and electrode/element architectures for efficient battery designs to not scale well to the dimensions required for such applications.
The associated methods of the prior art for manufacturing micro-batteries having improved power and energy densities approaching those of conventional batteries constructed of two dimensional electrode elements include the use of high aspect ratio three dimensional electrode array architectures. Such three dimensional electrode element arrays are commonly used to form the anodes of micro-batteries and, when used to form three dimensional anode element arrays, are made of suitable materials, such as zinc, and in other instances, and again for example, are created by the microstructuring of a photo-resist, such as SU-8, with subsequent pyrolsis of the formed SU-8 to transform the formed SU-8 into highly order graphite, which in general is considered a better approach than the use of zinc anode material.
The manufacture of such three dimensional battery element arrays requires high volume batch production methods, but the manufacturing methods of the prior art have been generally unsatisfactory with regard to both yield rate and electrode element array quality.
The method of the present invention provides a solution to these and related problems of the prior art.